Irene Scott of Translators without Borders (TWB) describes the area outside the city as rolling hills where wild elephants once roamed — now home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world, tent cities housing around 600,000 Rohingya people who have fled across the border from Myanmar.

Currently 33% of countries allocate less than 1% of their health budget to the mind. The pharmaceutical industry is similarly shy about investing in this field. Indeed, at our company we can count the number of mental health projects translated on a single hand.

Believe it or not, the Cherokee Nation, located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, has always been on the cutting edge of new technology. A Cherokee language version of Windows was developed for Microsoft and is the only tribal language supported by Microsoft in its North American products.

In today’s world, it is taken for granted that products and services must be technically flawless. These technological solutions — the hidden back-ends — are made visible by language. How products and services speak to their consumers is one of the key contributors to successful market penetration.

When you think of a medical device, user experience(UX) might not come to mind as one of its key features. But UX is quickly rising in importance for medical device manufacturers, and global UX considerations are becoming an indispensable part of the typical medical device design process.

Anyone familiar with localizing patent content will acknowledge that it requires both language as well as domain-specific skills. Take that up a notch and attempt to machine translate more than 500 billion words of English patent data into Japanese in three months for use in a leading global patent research platform, and you have your work cut out for you.

Unless you have just entered the world of high-tech (or have been living under a rock for the last few years) you’ve certainly heard the buzz word-acronym MVP. In a sports context it stands for most valuable player, but in this case it stands for minimum viable product.

Picking the right languages is a key decision for growth-minded global software enterprises that use the internet as a sales and marketing channel. If they find the right languages, they can achieve significant growth, especially if they find ones characterized by gross domestic product (GDP) growth and increasing internet access.

The power of story is undeniable. Every civilization throughout history has told stories, utilizing dramatic heroes and far-off settings for effect. Usually these stories were told locally and without care of foreign understanding or appeal. With the movie industry now worth what it is — $38.6 billion according to the Motion Pictures Association of America — and globalization here to stay.

Many patients do not consider over-the-counter medications or herbal products to be medications even though they may use them for medicinal effects. Whether the patient speaks English, Spanish or a language that requires me to use an interpreter, the challenge remains the same.

Neural machine translation (MT) is a topic that is on everyone’s lips these days. With natural origins in academia, there has been some great in-depth coverage of how the technology actually works, ranging from broader expositions of how neural networks and deep learning can be applied to the challenge of translation to deep dives into the nuts and bolts (read: mathematics) of neural MT and its variants.

If you are a Punjabi/English community, liaison or public service interpreter living in Lucerne, Switzerland, you might consider moving to Vancouver, Canada, to improve your job opportunities. And if that does not work out, you might consider living in Toronto, Canada, or any number of other cities where there is a significant population that speaks Punjabi as a minority language.

Four times a day I pass an armored van parked outside the Archeological Museum of Athens, headphones in, my hands in the pockets of my parka stinking of campfire smoke and souvlaki. There is a sort of game we play, the police and I. They stare me down, nudging one another as soon as they spot me walking quickly down a wide street named 28th of October, the day that the Greeks defied Mussolini and began their resistance against fascism.

Perhaps no other quote has come to explain the localization industry better than what Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974, is widely quoted as saying: “If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.”

Iran remains one of the few economic pariahs that has managed to weather the pressure of international economic sanctions and remain robust enough to witness a financially liberal future without the cost of war or internal market collapse. A consumer base of 76 million has been made more easily accessible to European firms and is slightly more exposed to US investment, albeit with a few hurdles.

Being an 80s kid and growing up as part of the first “digital native” generation of India was a disconcerting yet exciting experience, full of social and personal dichotomy. On one hand, thanks to home computers and access to the internet (in the age of dial-up!), a whole new world opened up for me and my peers. On the other hand, this somehow worked to further widen the social disparity between the have and the have-nots in India.

Like Spanish, Arabic poses a tough challenge to digital brands providing localized experiences. Arabic ranks as the seventh most important online language, with a total audience of 166 million and online gross domestic product (GDP) of $1.7 trillion in 2016.

Rapanui is considered one of the most diverse languages within Austronesian lin-guistics. Spoken by around 2,700 people on Easter Island, called Rapa Nui by natives, the language has been conditioned by its ambiguous history and multicultures during the thousands of years of its existence.

Game localization combines some of the hardest challenges of software localization with the need for creativity often reserved for literary translation. At the same time, some consider it a less serious type of work “because games are for kids.” As a result, game localizers don’t always get the recognition they deserve.

Communication is a critical component in modern warfare. Neither intelligence gathering nor logistics nor multinational armed forces can operate unless lines of communication are functioning reliably and safely. Telephony and computers enable signal intelligence and strategic operations, but what about the human element?

European startups may not enjoy as much publicity buzz as their counterparts based in Silicon Valley — but they are no less exciting. Some of the unique features of European companies, such as their multicultural and multilingual backgrounds, act as advantages when it comes to scaling up globally.

Hundreds of thousands of people are streaming into Southern Europe and making their way, many by foot, toward Northern and Western Europe. They are arriving to escape war in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, or grinding poverty elsewhere. They are risking their lives and even the lives of their children in order to do so.

A debate over the words should and shall almost derailed the world’s first universal climate deal in Paris in December 2015. The word shall would have legally obliged countries to cut emissions rather than just having to try to.

In translation projects with images and graphics that include text, good planning can mean the difference between an effective approach or days of back-and-forth. Here we will look at some tips for preparing image text, from the bare basics to a few advanced pointers.

Of all knowledge workers one could possibly think of, interpreters are among the few that, due to the very nature of their task, cannot take full advantage of new technologies that have the potential to completely revolutionize their work.

Todd Resnick is a Los Angeles native and his companies, Todd Resnick Interactive Group and The Voice Company, both provide voiceover and language conversion services across the globe in 70+ languages, leveraging the creativity of over 4,000 voice talents.

Scientific discoveries are often restrained by language. The English language may be thought of as the “universal language” in the global scientific community, but only a fraction of scientists actually speak the language, continuing to publish information in their native languages and in non-English databases.

My first exhibition of endangered alphabets — 13 carvings, each with Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights carved in a different endangered writing system — was held in May 2010, and to my astonishment people began talking about it, writing about it, even filming it.

A lot of work goes into developing a successful app. First you have to study the trends to ensure your app idea is a marketable one. Next, you have to plan out your app’s design, taking into account not only the elements and functionality you want to include…

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” This old saying dates back to the seventeenth century and is widely attributed to the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes in his world-famous novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha.

XML has become one of the defining technologies that is helping to reshape the face of both computing and publishing. It is helping to drive down costs and dramatically increase interoperability between diverse computer systems.

Traditionally, medical device industry translations are considered exceptional compared with the best practices of industries such as IT, and for good reason. This is a highly regulated industry, and the quality of translation is not just a matter of customer satisfaction.

I’d like to tell you the story of a toothbrush. A toothbrush, you ask? Yes. A toothbrush. This little toothbrush, according to the manufacturer’s website, “is the world’s first smart toothbrush, a manual brush that monitors your oral hygiene habits and reports them to a smartphone app.”

Market analyses show that commercial translation currently represents an annual market of $21–$26 billion. However, the current lack of interoperability, automation and standards in multilingual content production is costly.

Several years ago I wrote a review of MadCap Lingo 4. Now, four versions later, I’ve taken some time to look at the tool again, and I find that I like some of what I see in the new and improved Lingo 8.

As a career advisor in the language industry, I spend a lot of time looking at résumés. Résumés, if written correctly, can tell a lot about someone. Along with experience and length of service in various roles, I am always sure to take a peek at what education and training someone has had.

Although it may seem incredible in a world where information oozes from plasma screens on every corner, crucial health and sanitation information may not be available in a comprehensible format for the world’s poorest and most underserved populations.

Some believe the white disk on the Laotian flag represents the unity of the people. Another theory is that it symbolizes the full moon rising over the Mekong River. A third is that it signifies the country’s bright future, and this is perhaps the most pertinent.

XTM by XTM International is a scalable, web-based translation solution for freelance translators, language service providers (LSPs) and enterprises. The tool supports the entire workflow from project creation to delivery of the translated documents.

They were rare, but greatly appreciated. I’m referring to those few translation projects that came in and required a translator who could adeptly translate between Ecuadorian Spanish and American English.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often the frst sector to recover after a recession, but with depressed domestic economies they are being encouraged to grow their business in overseas markets.

By the time this article is printed, it will have been months since the Chick-fil-A scandal. Those of you reading this in the United States will hope- fully let out a groan at old debates drudged anew, and it’s my hope beyond hope that those of you outside the United States will have no idea what I’m talking about.

When I returned from four years of studying in France, everyone back home in the United States was quick to ask me the same question: “Did you just love Paris?” Unforrtunately, if I was being honest, my answer was no.

Three years ago, acting on a notion so whimsical I assumed it was a kind of presenile monoma-nia, I began carving endangered alphabets. The disclaimers start right away. I’m not a linguist, an anthropologist, a cultural historian or even a woodworker. I’m a writer…

April 2, 2012, wasn’t just another hot day in Nairobi, Kenya. It was the day Translators without Borders (TWB) started the pilot test site of its Health Translators’ Training Program, to train a team of Kenyans how to translate health information into Swahili.